


Hide, For a Little While

by IrisCandy



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 00:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1325482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IrisCandy/pseuds/IrisCandy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of Lydia's coping mechanisms is a little different. It's very subjective. It's a brittle attempt at comfort, a lot of the time. Of course, that doesn't stop her from sharing it with Stiles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hide, For a Little While

He had only come to give her the homework she'd missed that day. She knew that. But Stiles hadn't wanted to talk much in the past week since...well, since everything. The absolute horror show they'd all went through, expelling the nogitsune from his body. Even before that, when Stiles had to watch his own hands run a pair of wolfbane laced knives through Isaac's body, something that the werewolf had yet to recover from.

Who knew what else Stiles had seen that he wouldn't talk about. 

So she couldn't help but take advantage of the opportunity when Stiles had entered her room with a text book and a journal piled in his arms and a pair of purple circles under his eyes that had yet to fade.

"Uh, you probably won't need them," Stiles said, letting the books fall to her bed, "but I brought my notes too, in case you wanted to copy them."

"Thank you," Lydia said with a tight smile, her voice still hoarse from the cold that had been plaguing her for the past couple of days.

"Yeah, no problem," Stiles replied. He straightened, looking at her cross legged on her bed in her pajamas with that downcast look forever cemented to his face. 

He cleared his throat and scratched the back of his neck a moment. "So how are you feeling?"

Lydia sighed, leaning her back against her bed's headboard. "Better. I guess. I mean, it probably only feels worse because I can't imagine going back to school yet...I don't know how you're doing it."

The corner of Stiles' mouth quirked up almost imperceptibly. Lydia was a little shocked to find that she would probably give anything in the world to see the smile reach his eyes again. For him, for her. For normalcy.

"I think I just sort of needed the distraction," he said.

She nodded, sucking on her lip. 

After a beat, Stiles took in a deep breath and nodded his head, backing up a little. "I better go then. I'll, uh...let you rest."

And then he was leaving and Lydia was struck with the sudden feeling of being pushed off the side of building.

"Stiles," she said abruptly.

His hand was on the door frame, and there was a little pang of hurt in her heart when she saw him visibly slouch a little at the sound of his name, like he'd been hoping she wouldn't call him back.

But he turned around anyway, his eyebrows sliding up expectantly; his throat working like it was getting hard to swallow.

Her heart sped up a little. She hadn't quite planned out what she was going to say to him, only that he couldn't leave. Not again. Not like this.

"Stiles, I just - I need you to talk to me," she said, and there was more honesty in those words than she'd expected to come out of her mouth. "You can't keep doing this to us."

Stiles frowned, shaking his head at her. "To us? Who's us, Lydia? Isaac, who I put in the hospital twice? Scott, who I tortured with a sword? Allison? Kira? My dad? I tormented all of them, Lydia, I hurt...I hurt you."

His voice broke a little on the last three words, and she couldn't understand it because other than a few horrifying whispers in her ear or the feel of his fingers a little too rough in her hair, the nogitsune had hardly touched her at all.

Before she could speak, he continued, and she realized it was the most he'd spoken since he'd become himself again. "I'm gonna take a guess and say that they can all do without talking to me for a little while. You know, distance - distance is good, at this point, I think."

Lydia could have cried. She could have. She'd wanted to for a while now and yet she still hadn't let the tears fall. So she wouldn't cry now.

She only looked at him. She noticed how he seemed to shrink in his red sweater. She noticed the contrast of his eyes and the shadows around them compared to his light, almost pale skin. She saw something in him that wasn't there before and she didn't know if it was only the way she saw him now or if he had truly changed before her eyes.

But she also saw the potential for him to become whole again. She saw herself in him, as she was months ago when Peter had been in control of the most crucial parts of her. And then she remembered how she was now. Stronger at the seams. A force to be reckoned with.

Maybe he could be, too.

"Do you remember," she started softly, "when Peter was controlling me?"

His jaw tensed, but he only nodded slowly, and then he dropped down to her bed like he owed it to her. Like no matter how badly he wanted to leave her room, her voice was the absolute basis for him to stay.

He stared down at her bed sheets with a crease between his eyes as she continued.

"Did I ever tell you that I beat him? That I got revenge on him?"

Stiles couldn't help but look up at her now. He sat right at her feet, almost touching the tips of her toes under the sheet, and he looked at her with an intensity on his face that told her he was listening to her every word.

"Yeah? How?"

"It's a long story. You'll find out eventually," Lydia said. "The point is...Stiles, the point is that I did beat him. And it never really felt like I did because of everything that was left after I'd hurt so many people, but I did. And so did you."

"Beat Peter?" Stiles asked with a quirk of his eyebrow.

She smacked his arm lightly. "The nogitsune, moron." 

That begged another little smile from him, lasting longer this time, and she felt her heart swell a size in her chest.

And then it was his turn to speak, and she could only hope he would.

He opened his mouth, and nothing came out for a while as he stared at the floor ahead of him, leaving her to look at his tired profile.

"I think I'd feel more like I beat him if I didn't have to look like a monster all the time," Stiles said. "You know, if the damned thing hadn't used my face to terrorize everyone."

Lydia got an absurd idea just then. It was silly, and if it was any boy other than Stiles, they probably would have protested. But because she knew he would bear with her, let her help him like she had before - the locker room floor, a tub of ice water, a steady hand on his shoulder when the nogitsune had gone for good - she decided to go with it.

"I can show you something that helped me with that," Lydia said quietly, rolling out of her cross legged position to come up on her knees beside him. "When I didn't like what I was seeing."

They were close now. He turned his face to look at her, and she was mere inches away, looking at him from under her lashes because she was afraid she'd scare him off this time.

But he stared at her a moment, his eyes flicking back and forth across her face, before nodding.

She nodded once back before quietly sliding off the bed and making her way over to her vanity. There, on the table, was the powder concealer she used to cake on her face every day, until recently. Now she only uses it for the odd blemish that appears.

Stiles looked beyond confused when she padded back to him with the compact of powder in her hands. She hopped back on to the bed, folding her legs underneath her and turning her body to look at him.

She reached up and grabbed his chin gently between her fingers, moving his face so that he was looking right at her.

"Contrary to popular belief, women aren't the only ones who use foundation," she said, a quirk to her lips.

"And what, exactly, are you planning to do with that?" Stiles said, his words slightly muffled with her fingers still on his cheeks.

She removed her hand and opened the compact, dabbing two fingers in the powder before raising them up in front of her face.

"Trust me," she said quietly.

He swallowed thickly as he tried to look at her fingers so close to his face, but trying only made him go cross eyed, so he moved his eyes to look at her face instead.

As she brought her fingers, ever so gently, over the skin under his eyes, over his cheekbones, she tried not to think about his eyes on her. She bit her lip, watching as the dark circles that made Stiles look more destroyed and exhausted than anything else started to fade away under the pale powder.

And then, after only a minute of silence, Stiles' eyes fluttered closed against her touch. The tips of her fingers would occasionally brush lightly against one of his long eyelashes, and there was a buildup in her chest that she couldn't explain. A kind of suffocation that she welcomed rather than feared.

After the concealer had been spread under his eyes, he looked more like the old Stiles had, before all of this. The shadows were still there, lurking beneath, refusing to disappear under artificial skin, but they could pretend. Just as she used to pretend. Just as she used to wipe away the shine of the tear tracks on her cheeks with a clean sheet of blush.

She sat back a moment and looked at him. He still hadn't opened his eyes. A furrow in his brow made him look like he was pained, in a way, and she reached forward, her palm on his neck and her thumb grazing the sharp line of his cheekbone comfortingly.

He opened his eyes and looked at her, and as usual, it was like she was the world to him. Like nothing, nothing at all, could exist besides her when she was so close to him. His pulse sped up under her hand just as her heart picked up the pace in her chest.

And she couldn't take it. Regretting it the moment she did it, she ducked her head. She moved it toward the mirror on her vanity, and after a second, Stiles' followed her eyes and she let her hand drop to his shoulder.

"Better?" she asked softly.

Stiles didn't respond for a long time. She watched his reflection, saw his blinking speed up the longer he stared. And then she looked at the side of his face, saw him struggling to swallow, to breathe.

It was always a struggle to breathe.

She took his hand, and it was this that finally made him look away from himself.

"Yeah," he said quietly, looking down at their hands, and then up at her. "That's better."

She bit her bottom lip, hard, feeling the deep lines forming on her brow now. She let her head drop to the side, her hair loose down her back as she gently squeezed his shoulder, his bicep. His thumb traced the side of her hand.

They stayed there for a long time, letting the silence weigh heavily on their shoulders because there was nothing left to say. She wasn't sure how long it had been when she finally let her head fall on his shoulder, and they looked at themselves in the mirror; stared at the people they'd become and tried to decide whether or not they were at peace with what they saw.

She knew it wasn't better. Not in the slightest.

But she was glad he was pretending with her.


End file.
